Eight years after her revelatory first book, Emily Wilson deepens her focus and extends her vision in new poems of striking intelligence and originality. Venturing into landscapes both interior and exterior, Micrographia explores what Wilson calls 鈥渢he complex rigged wildness鈥 of geographical, emotional, and verbal states, a territory located 鈥渟omewhere in that / enjambment within / a cave within the brain.鈥 Following in the tradition of such poets as Dickinson, Bishop, and Ammons, Wilson鈥檚 work regards the mind as 鈥渆nmeshed鈥 with the natural world, always 鈥渁t the hinge of going over.鈥 Her way of speaking is as precisely calibrated and as restless as her way of seeing, and the terrain of Micrographia rises from a rich and unpredictable encounter with poetic language and form. At the same time, the voice of these poems is never less than urgent, 鈥渃oming clear by the foment / moving through it.鈥
Wilson鈥檚 eye travels the troubled boundaries between visible and invisible worlds, ranging from coastal Nova Scotia to the Andean highlands to Brooklyn鈥檚 industrial Gowanus Canal to the poet鈥檚 own backyard. Steeped in tradition but spoken in tones that are utterly distinctive, these intricate poems enter into the microscopic, micrographic spaces between words and things, between thinking and being.
"Robert Hooke made small phenomenal; likewise, Emily Wilson allows us鈥攊f I may borrow two words from Henry James鈥攁n 鈥榠mmense intimacy鈥 with the world. From their first chord (鈥榤ore rose than rubiate鈥; 鈥榝oment moving through it鈥) to their lovely last thoughts at water, the poems in Micrographia are an unusual pleasure to say. And what that saying lets us see鈥攗p close and, as Wallace Stevens would have it, 鈥榥ot Personal鈥欌攊s splendid.鈥濃擥raham Foust, author, Necessary Stranger
鈥淓mily Wilson scrutinizes the interstices鈥攋oints鈥攕eams鈥攕trata鈥攃racks in nature, extending and complicating ideas of beauty and perspective. These are astonishing poems, with their intricate diction and bitten syntax. They reveal an intelligence not less wild, not less original, than the world that is the focus of Wilson鈥檚 quiet, fierce attention鈥濃擬ichele Glazer
I.
Fugitive
Morpho Terrestre
Interior
Small Study
Endemic
Camperdown Elm
Monadnock
Motif
Little Gothic
Event
Sunset: Rouen?
Growth and Form
Stereotype
Prospect
II.
Blue Hill
Poem
Picturesque
Little Discourse
Spring Intensive
Tableau
Coal Age
Monoprint
Round the Mountain
Zoetrope
Johnny Rotten鈥檚 Produce
Watercolor with Scraping-Out
Notchland
III.
Micrographia
The Yew
Pleasant Hill
Protea
Gray and Greens
Synthetic Figment
Fidelity
The Spruce
Spiral Bound
North
Red-Legged Kittiwake
Excursion
Interior
reflections in a marriage breakfront
in which to glimpse a door
has just been opened
a child come half-way through
then backed back in again
or outside arms of red cedars
I must think before thinking of them
so limber road-red and persisting
around to some mean
I must go toward through snow
barrens above an ocean
the cognitions of which give of
shales of greens of
things I know dwell there
